New START and the Future of Arms Control

Jeffrey Lewis 0:08

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control disarmament and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:23

And I am Aaron Stein, Director of Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in an almost sunny Philadelphia.

Jeffrey 0:33

It's fall break, or sorry, rather, it's winter break, a.k.a. Ski week, a.k.a. Kids are home screaming.

Aaron 0:46

My kids are upstairs. Wife has got them for the next 36 minutes. And I'm ready for school to start back up again.

Jeffrey 0:57

Yeah. As you can imagine, my children are as obstreperous as I am, which is charming in its own way.

Aaron 1:04

She fell in love with it once upon a time, and she continues to be immersed in it all the time.

Jeffrey 1:10

Yep. Whatever comes after stereo. What happens when you get it in a quadrophenia? This is like that Who album, but with four very annoying opinionated people who do not like to be told what to do.

Aaron 1:26

Listeners of the podcast will, will know this to be true. Yes, so we are extend a treaty get a pod. It's, we haven't done a New Start treaty pod in a while, so it's time to bring the band back because it's back.

Jeffrey 1:45

Yeah, yeah. And actually, I have to say, it's extremely strange, like in a wonderful way, but still very strange to see so many friends cycling into the administration. Right. You know, because it's going to be hard to call them fools and nincompoops and liars because I like them all so much. That's true. I mean, I'm going to have to change my whole shtick.

Aaron 2:12

Oh, man. Yeah. But it's also reassuring in that these people are not naked, stupid or liars. They are people of honor.

Jeffrey 2:20

Well, you know, I mean, what what I would say for listeners to the podcast, we did that very strange pseudo political podcast last spring where we said, you know, this is very strange that in the primaries, Biden is held out as this like extreme right wing figure when on our issues. He's very progressive, you know, more so, I would say, than Warren or Sanders.

And, you know, I think from a national security standpoint, the picks certainly suggest that. It's the most arms control friendly group of senior leaders I could conceive.

Aaron 3:02

And yet I think for a number of reasons we're about ready to get into, the future of arms control looks a little murky.

Jeffrey 3:09

You could not pick a nicer group of people for this to happen.

Aaron 3:13

It's going to be tough. I mean, we got the easy part done and maybe we should talk about that. So we we we we tapped in the the the gimme as if we're using a golf reference. But like we're staring down the par five now and I'm really bad at golf.

Jeffrey 3:27

Yeah, I I have an article coming out probably in Foreign Affairs. It's a left to get final approval, right? We've been through several edits. Let's just say that Jeffrey's unique voice is a little bit of a stretch for the magazine or the website or wherever they're going to put it. It might not be a stretch for hitting delete.

We'll see if it comes out. But I have written a couple of articles that have been submitted and we'll see if one of those versions comes out. In which I ask this question, the Biden administration has extended New START and the extension is for five years. And we should talk a little bit about some of the criticism of that.

But it isn't like. That means this problem is fixed for five years. It means that we have no more than five years and frankly, probably a lot less than that to figure out how we are going to revive this endeavor of arms control. And one of the lines that got cut Which offends people, but I think is true, is while I definitely wanted the administration to extend New Start, my argument was that New Start is like the Colosseum in Rome.

It is a relic of a bygone era. And if the Colosseum were to fall down tomorrow, that would be sad. It would be a disappointment for the tourists and for antiquarians. But it wouldn't mean the end of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire is long dead. And I think the first era of arms control is long dead.

And it's good that we extended New Start. But we're not going to be able to continue on the way we have. We are going to have to build a second era of arms control. And it's going to be hard. But having said that, Good on them for extending it five years. It was the right decision.

Aaron 5:29

Let's start first with the criticism. The criticism comes basically from recently departed Trump officials, which said that they had created all this leverage to try and basically put the Russians in a box and to bring the Chinese into that box so that we could bottle them up. She said that that's about it. And so that by extending New START without getting any more concessions, they traded away U.S. leverage.

Jeffrey 5:53

Yes, the same geniuses who believe that they had solved the North Korean nuclear problem and that they had that they had resolved the issue of Iran's nuclear ambitions, believe that they were on the verge of of of getting an arms control agreement where, you know, Russia and China would fall to their knees and apologize for every ever having dared threat the United States.

I will say this in their defense. If you believe. That coronavirus is a hoax and you believe that the election was fraudulent. And if you believe that there is a former senior intelligence official named Q who's about to blow the lid on the cabal of pedophiles running the world. It's not that much further to go ahead and think that Marshall Billingsley might have a point that you had some leverage.

I mean, I mean, that's still slightly crazier than those other three things. But, I mean, in for a penny, in for a pound, I mean, sure. Like, yeah, I mean, it is incredibly frustrating that the people who had four years to exercise that leverage, including a period when it looked like Trump would get reelected, it's like you say you could, but you didn't.

Like, I don't know how to, like... You didn't. And not only did you not with Russia, you didn't with anybody else either. Like, you got no deals. You suck. Like, I'm sorry. You're just, you're over, you know, whatever.

Aaron 7:15

It's the Alice and Shane song link. If I could, would you? And they didn't. It never happened. But... But the thing that you said, maybe we talk about the thing that you led off with is that I was referenced is that Newstart was just hanging there as the five year extension as the no brainer. The barrel of issues that we're staring down right now.

As we begin to conceptualize what a treaty looks at beyond sort of the start series, right? You know, like salt, start, new start, blah, blah, blah, is so tremendous is that I just remain pessimistic about where this is going. I don't know how else to say it.

Jeffrey 7:59

Yeah, well, I... Let me share a story about the early phases of New START, which I think perfectly encapsulates where we are in terms of the delta, as it were, between what we need to do and what we possibly can do politically in the United States. I had been part of this group that Mort Halperin and Arnie Cantor, the late Arnie Cantor, put together to look at U.S. nuclear policy.

And we actually brought together a, shall we say, a politically diverse group of individuals, which, you know, ran the gamut from Joe Cirincione to Frank Miller. So no true difference. You know, but, but, but at the same time, I mean, you know, I, no one loves nuclear weapons more than Frank Miller. Right. So we, we did this little project and eventually sort of They all used that project basically as a kind of stepping stone to then the other things they did.

So some of them participated in the Strategic Posture Commission where there was a recommendation for a New START-like treaty. And when New START finally dropped, everybody, including Frank, supported it. But what was so notable to me was that the people who I thought of as being conservative on nuclear weapons policy thought New START was a really good agreement.

And I had one person directly tell me that the thing we have to be careful is that the attack is going to come from the left because it's such a modest agreement, not the right. And it's like, no, your political judgment's completely wrong. It's the other way around. Any agreement, you know, just like the UN Disabilities Treaty, any agreement runs into this Boltonite argument about sovereignty where this idea of signing international agreements is a compromise of our popular sovereignty.

And we just can't do it. So, you know, if New Start was seen by Republicans as this kind of, you know, enormous. I don't even know how to say, you know, I mean, New Start is a New Start was a start. Right. It was it was a watered down. Like it's it's a terrible agreement. Not not a terrible agreement because the people involved are terrible.

I think they worked very hard. But like it just it was kind of a. It was meant as a bridge to some other future and like they built half the – and they like built the bridge and we got over to the other side and we're like – Well, I think you're saying that because kind of both sides got what they wanted, which is of course like the essence of compromise.

Aaron 10:38

But the compromise required of both sides wasn't strenuous. So it wasn't hard to meet the limits and subtotals within the New Star Treaty. Would you agree with that?

Jeffrey 10:50

Yeah, yeah, well, I would agree. And, you know, I'll say one more thing about New Start before we move on to the current moment, because I think it actually bridges us from that moment to this moment. But I think one of the things I found so frustrating about the New Start process is there are real flaws in that agreement.

And I think we see those flaws as time has gone on. If you go back and look at the complaints that the treaty opponents lodged, none of the things they said were right, right? Right. I shouldn't say none. I mean, but basically their fundamental objection to me is unrelated to the reasons that one might have criticisms of.

Right. And so so it becomes very hard to have a reasonable discussion about the treaty because, you know, like you want to have a conversation about like. Right. Right.

Aaron 11:55

Right, right, right, right. You know, but I think with the things, the essence of those critics, you know, the critics from the right, and they are always from the right, you know, the left wants you to do more, but are willing to take this in incremental chunks where the right doesn't even like to take a chunk out of anything.

Goes back to sort of the riff that you did for your maybe where it ends up on the foreign affairs website or in print we don't know article which is you know the thomas shelling famous article in foreign affairs i think from 85 am i remembering that yes you are winter i haven't read it in a while i did see it poking around my twitter and i will admit i didn't pick it back up but i have read the article so perhaps i just tee you up and you take us home on how that is sort of The basis for the pushback against the arguments that we're talking about.

Arguments against it. Right.

Jeffrey 12:46

So the fundamental shortcoming of New START, I would argue, is that it covers some of the systems that Russia is developing. And, you know, opponents say it covers none of them. That's not true. It covers some of them. But it doesn't cover all of them. And moreover, there is no prospect that it will ever cover all of them for a very simple reason, which is that the United States is unwilling to limit missile defenses.

And in my assessment, the major drivers of new programs in China and Russia, the major driver is a desire to defeat U.S. missile defenses. And it is it seems so obvious to me. It is obvious. That if Russia says, we're going to build 12 new systems in large numbers to destroy your missile defenses, and we show up and say, we should really limit those, and the Russians say, Yes, we agree.

You limit your defenses. We'll limit our systems to defeat your defenses. And we say, oh, no, no, no, no, no. We're not going to limit our defenses. We just want to limit your ability to defeat our defenses. The Russians are going to look at us sadly, with pity in their eyes. Like, oh, Marshall, it's so sad that you were dropped on your head as a baby.

That's... That's just, you know, it must be so hard to go through life, unable to comprehend simple concepts like, no, you idiot. And so to me, to my mind, what like new start, new start is the last agreement of that post cold war era where Where there was a certain – where initially there was the ABM Treaty, but then even after Bush left the ABM Treaty, there was a period of, well, we'll see how this goes.

Where basically Russia was agreeing to bilateral arms control agreements on that traditional basis of we just keep cutting numbers. And the Russians will complain about our missile defenses, but they're not actually at the point where they're willing to like disrupt the process so that they can build stuff to defeat the defenses. And now I think we're in the era Where the Russians and the Chinese are committed, I will say, to their own defenses to match our capabilities, but at a more profoundly destabilizing level to a menagerie of new capabilities to beat those defenses.

And they're not giving them up without some limit on the defenses. Like, they just—they aren't. And that's what—that is—it is an exact— Analogy to what Tom was saying in the mid-1990s.

Aaron 15:42

Yeah, I mean, Tom was saying is that the fundamental problem is the U.S. inability to live with vulnerability. Right? And that's a Jeffrey Lewis argument as well.

Jeffrey 15:52

Yeah, I mean, Tom is always more careful and maybe smarter about how he says things than I do. So I'm not sure he ever comes out and says it quite so directly. But of course, it's implicit, right? But he says this amazing thing. And I recall the first time I read it and I was like, so offended because the title is what went wrong with arms control.

Right. Which is like, not, not the title that like lefties really want to read. You know, because people are like, no, no, we need more arms control in the mid eighties. Things with the Soviet Union, especially when he wrote it, like things hadn't turned. They were like really, really bad. And Tom was like, nah, this is all bulls**t. Like none of it's working.

But here, let me read you what he says, because I think this is ultimately the key passage. He says, the 15-year period from 1957 to 1972 is a remarkable story of intellectual achievement transformed into policy. By the way, Tom was a lovely, kind man. He was not a modest man. I mean, he was polite and he would never make you feel bad.

But, you know, Tom's taking himself. He's... Tom was always feeling himself. That was what I loved about Tom. Actually, after he passed away, somebody sent around a very ill-tempered note about how much they hated him. And it basically boiled down to Tom thought this person was an idiot and wasn't able to hide it. Which is funny because normally he is very polite, I think, and he was able to sort of, you know, rein it in a little bit.

But this person actually is particularly stupid. And I kind of loved that Tom just couldn't keep it under control. Anyway. He says, three books appeared in 1961 that epitomized an emerging consensus on what strategic arms control should be about. Each was a group effort and each stimulated discussion even while being written. Now this is lovely because he's able to name two other books, but of course he does mention, he mentions another book and he closes with another book, but the meat of it is that same summer a study group met on the outskirts of Boston and Morton H. Halperin and I produced a little book.

Discussed at numerous meetings of the Harvard-MIT faculty seminar at arms control during the fall of 1960, reflecting what we took to be a consensus, one that was wholly consistent with, and then he goes and compliments somebody else's book. So, hey, together these efforts were an intellectual achievement. A number of the participants in the Harvard-MIT seminar took positions in the Kennedy White House, Department of State, Department of Defense.

Others from Rand and elsewhere who had been part of this intellectual movement moved into the government as well. So it is not completely surprising that those ideas had become the basis for US policy and were ultimately implemented in the ABM Treaty. I consider that the culmination of 15 years of progress, not merely the high point, but the end point of successful arms control.

A lot of people were offended by the end point. But I think what Tom was getting at Was first saying all the other stuff you do is only possible because we are limiting a driver of the arms race. Everything else is a result of our defenses. Not exactly everything else. But in terms of arms control, limiting the ABM treaty, I think in his idea, makes possible all these other limits.

And he doesn't care whether the other limits are in treaties or whatever. It's like solving that ABM problem is the key. And I think particularly given when it's written, he is focusing his attention on you really only have one treaty that matters and Reagan is about to destroy it. And he's too careful and – careful is not the right word because it's not like he ever pulled his punches.

But he's very Tom-like in his authorship. And I – at the time, I didn't really – I don't think I loved that article the first time I read it when I was a student as much as I do now. Because I actually think that we had this discussion in the 1990s when there was a debate about withdrawing from the ABM Treaty and then culminating in Bush actually doing it.

But at the time we were like, the ABM Treaty is the cornerstone of arms control. And... We believed that. And then Bush withdrew and nobody calls for resurrecting it, right? Like everybody is like, oh, well, we could do this. We could do that. We could do that. But if you truly believed it was the foundation of arms control, then there is nothing else we can talk about until we put something like it back.

Aaron 20:44

Yeah. And I would say, you know, if we're talking about this sort of post, I mean, it's called the second age of arms control, right? Yeah. I think one of the other major things to fall is that we eventually did see the Russian response, and the Russian response was essentially to battering ram the – to screwdriver the INF.

And New START and the INF have to go together, right, even though there are loopholes that we've talked about on this podcast. But, you know, like it's not – no longer just a matter of thinking about this in terms of strategic systems, but it's basically the three pillars of arms control that we had reached with the Russians and the Soviets – That have more or less descended into just one and we're not all that happy with New Start to begin with.

Jeffrey 21:31

Well, right. And I guess what I'm... So, I mean, the way I look at it is when Bush announces he's withdrawing from the ABM Treaty in December 2001... At the time, the Russians are kind of like... The Russians and the Chinese are like, well, you shouldn't do that. That's going to cause an arms race. But they don't overplay it, right?

They just say that's going to cause an arms race. And what we see now is the fruits of the last 20 years of research. And Putin himself said that when he unveiled all these new weapons. He said that most of these programs were resurrected after... Most of these programs were resurrected after the U.S. withdrew from the ABM Treaty.

And indeed, if you go look... There's this great little book that Rold Sagdeev and some other Soviet scientists published in the 1980s that talked about all the ways they planned to defeat missile defenses. It's basically a playbook for all the stuff the Russians are doing now. Right. So they just went and dusted off all these old programs and reinvigorated them.

Now, there's some domestic component in Russia and China that we have to talk about at some point. But to me, fundamentally, just like we argued that the start in the INF Treaty had to work together. That there were holes in the INF treaty that we knew existed that were plugged with START, and then they didn't remember to plug them in New Start. None of those treaties, to my mind, work without the ABM treaty, and it, it was an illusion. Like when, when Bush left, like the Russians couldn't immediately deploy counters. They wanted to take their time to develop the systems. They wanted to see how the political situation played out, and so we had this.

Period after Bush withdraws through New Start when I think we were sleepwalking because we assume that the quietness of the Russian and Chinese response was acquiescence to this new world in which we limit offenses and can build all the defenses we want. And what we are now waking up to is that was false, right? That was a daydream.

Aaron 23:27

So I think I can see where your argument is going. But that's why we keep talking about why this is really, really hard is because missile defense is the third rail of American politics and nobody really wants to talk about it in terms of limitations. Right.

Jeffrey 23:44

And it's one of the things I love about Tom's article because whenever I tell people like we have to find a way to limit defense, people are like, well, it's impossible. And there's a part of me that gets really frustrated with that because although I understand the desire for arms control advocates to be helpful, you know, we want to tell things to our friends in government that they can do.

You know, like what we're really saying is like, wow, this is like school shootings. They're bad, but we're not actually going to do anything about them.

Aaron 24:17

Yeah.

Jeffrey 24:17

You know, and it's like, yeah, so... That's not good enough. I get that we might lose, but if you think an elementary school full of dead kids is bad, wait till you see a nuclear war. These are things that there's a right and a wrong, and we ought to give advice that is honest and direct about what you have to do to fix the problem.

And if it turns out that you don't fix the problem and we all die, well, we don't fix the problem and we all die, but But I think especially those of us on the outside, we have an obligation to be honest. And it's actually a conversation I had with Tom because I think one of the reasons we got along is, you know, I'm blunt.

And I'll never forget one of our first meaningful interactions is we were at a meeting and somebody said something nice about Colin Powell. And this was in like the you know, this was in the Bush years. And. You know, I just as we've probably discussed many times, I just I don't like the man the way other people do.

I don't I don't share the sense of admiration. And I, you know, announced why I didn't like him and didn't think he was a particularly useful voice on a particular issue. And Tom just kind of smiled this wry smile like, I don't think I've ever heard anyone criticize him before. And it was just he had this delight, right, that I was I was willing to do that.

So fast forward. I invite him to give this talk at the New America Foundation. And he is making this argument that we have to limit defenses. And at the time, I'm like looking forward and thinking like, oh, maybe I want to go in the Obama administration. Or, you know, I think at this point, like we're hoping this guy Obama will get the nomination and maybe get elected.

And like, oh, you can't say limit defenses. Like, you know, I'm being like all mealy mouthed. And we get in like the elevator afterwards. And he just looks at me like, do you really think? We can do this without limiting defenses. I mean, he said it like much more politely, but also really directly. And I felt this small.

Like I'm making tiny, like I was, I chickened out and he called me on my bullshit. You know, and it was like plaintiff, like he knew that I thought we should limit defenses. And he knew that I was like, you know, adjusting my rhetoric to try to focus on the possible. And he was just like, but you know, like I'm right.

Like, you know, I'm right. And I was like, yeah, yeah, you're right. I mean, my Tom impressions are terrible by the way. He didn't talk like that, but yeah. So I just – I feel like we have to tell the truth. You're not going to have a second era of arms control unless you limit defenses.

Aaron 26:57

And I think what we should say, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, is that it's not all missile defenses. I don't think we would have to limit all missile defenses. I think it would be a category of missile defenses. And so I do think you could get away with certain systems that the Russians would accept.

Yeah. But it would be basically the SM3 sites in Europe. I don't understand why those have become so important to U.S. politics.

Jeffrey 27:28

Well, because I think they are ripe for limiting, and there is an ideological refusal to limit any defenses. But yeah, I mean, one of the great things about Tom's article is there is a nod to the politics of the day, because he very directly just says that the fact that the ABM Treaty allows some ABM systems, each site was allowed two sites, which they later limited to one.

He says it had one characteristic that was incompatible with its philosophy, but was probably a political necessity. Know, I, I try to take that same attitude. You know, obviously what we want to do is, we want to limit strategic defenses that can undermine stability and that drive a lot of these programs. And so, you know, you have these twin tasks of limiting the number of strategic defenses so that you can limit the number of, of, of systems built in response. and again, if we're going to limit the number, we're not going to be able to eliminate the systems built in response. We're only going to be able to limit and limit.

And then you have some kind of demarcation exercise where you try to find ways to say, well, the the Patriot is OK. The SM three is like that's, you know, Congress directed them to do an SM three test against an ICBM for a reason. Right. To erase that demarcation line. So you have to figure out like what.

Constraints do you put on, on systems that are kind of straddling the world, the line between systems that we could live with that are, you like shooting down Scuds, and, and systems that are clearly going to be destabilizing, like, like shooting down ICBMs? And it's like, it's not obvious to me what the answers to all those questions are, but it is, it is obvious to me that you're not going to be able to limit systems on the offensive side without answering those questions and finding a way to limit the systems. And we do have to wrap up, but that may not even be enough to get China involved in this round.

Aaron 29:24

Do you know what I mean? I've never, you know, the China boogeyman. I just don't even think at that level of arms control that they are prepared to even come in. And that will be difficult, too.

Jeffrey 29:36

Yeah, I think that numerically they expect us to come down to where they are before they start living with numbers. And I think that's going to be politically pretty hard for people. The real numbers are the numbers they have in tunnels. Oh, stop. You're hurting me.

Aaron 29:54

I just wanted to see your face. I could see Jeffrey for all the listeners. We're on two. Oh, man.

Jeffrey 30:01

Yeah. I will say this. The tendency, you know, if we are prepared to limit defenses with the Russians, the Chinese will prefer to free ride on that. Right. And so it would be a trick to try to get the Chinese involved in that. I am not a great believer in the prospect of trilateral arms control negotiations with the Chinese.

If you want to limit the Chinese, you have to do it on a multilateral basis. So like. Ratify the CTBT, which the Chinese have signed and are waiting to ratify, negotiate a fissile material cutoff treaty. There are things we could do to limit the Chinese arsenal. It's just that people don't want to do them. And my kind of closing thought on that, which is, I actually think the people who disagree know I'm right, and that's why they don't want any agreements.

And they want to say that they want agreements, and that's why they ask for the Goldilocks agreements. Like, we don't limit our defenses, but the Chinese joined the Russians in disarming themselves. Like, they know that's ridiculous and that that's not going to happen. But this is a pose, right? This is a pose where they say that they are in favor of something that actually they are against.

And it's exactly what Richard Perle did with the INF Treaty, right? He pushed for the double zero option because he thought it couldn't happen. It's exactly what Marshall Billingsley was doing with getting China into New START negotiations. He was pushing for it because he thought it was going to happen. And so I think I'm right. And I think they know that I'm right.

And that's why they don't want to do it, right? Because they don't want a world with agreements. And so we're having this like fantastically bad faith conversation, which, you know, what's new? What's new?

Aaron 31:49

Well, any closing thoughts here before I do the sign off?

Jeffrey 31:53

I'm just so excited that everybody got a taste of my ambient work environment.

Aaron 32:00

Well, they're right above me, so I just hear smashing of Legos. But I think the microphone drowns it out.

Jeffrey 32:07

Yeah. I love my oldest son, but boy, he is a copy of me.

Aaron 32:13

Better or mostly for worse.

Jeffrey 32:19

Oh, well, maybe he will get his article in Foreign Affairs. I'll never forget when he sarcastically at three looked at me and said, Dad, do you even know what a nuke is? He was absolutely convinced that on this subject, he had the superior knowledge. And Sebastian, many Republicans would agree. That's funny.

Aaron 32:44

Okay. Well, with that, good luck to the new team. You're gonna need it so head on over to patreon.com slash acw podcast where you can join our slack channel three dollars if you're a student five dollars if you're a regular person that donation helps support the pod and keeps us going so that we can hear more of jeffrey and his and his future son sebastian who maybe we should have on the show to explain new stuff thanks for joining aaron